This invention relates to an automated process and device for propagation of plants using tissue culture (in vitro) techniques.
In conventional procedures for plant cloning or propagations by tissue culture, a portion of a plant is placed in a nutrient medium in an aseptic controlled environment and caused to grow. The medium typically has hormones to encourage plant growth of a desired type. Once the plant reaches a given stage of growth, it is divided and separated and placed in additional container having growth medium, thus proliferating the plant. Aseptic conditions are required to discourage bacterial and fungal contamination which can cause significant losses. The most widely used current process for aspectic plant tissue culture propagation requires an operator to manually remove plant tissue from culture medium and divide it into a number of parts which are manually aseptically replanted into containers containing new media. This procedure is slow, highly labor intensive and exposes the plant to the potential for contamination. The high labor costs associated with such processes have limited the commercial viability of this approach.
In order for in vitro proliferation systems to be commercially viable on a larger scale, an automated system is needed in which plant material is cut into uniformly sized pieces. Following the cutting process, the cut material should be distributed in a precisely controlled and uniform manner in growth vessels. Distribution of the cut plant material within the growth vessels must be uniform in order to better predict maturation time, and to more efficiently utilize the culture media required. Various systems for automated plant tissue culture proliferation systems are presently known. These systems typically employ a blender which finely divides the plant tissue into small components which are thereafter deposited on a suitable growth medium. Although these processes work well for some applications, they are unsuited for certain plant species and, further, are believed to provide lower yield due to the indiscriminate manner in which the plants are divided (causing much damage). Moreover, problems of needing excess liquid to facilitate blending and difficulties with cleaning and sterilication of numerous components are present with such processes.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need to provide an automated proliferation system which divides plant tissue and distributes it in a uniform manner under aseptic conditions while minimizing the above noted problems with prior art systems.